


Night after Night

by Ahsim



Category: Gundam Wing
Genre: M/M, Scherazade AU, a very unpleasant Heero, mentions of torture and capture
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-01
Updated: 2017-02-01
Packaged: 2018-09-21 08:37:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9540011
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ahsim/pseuds/Ahsim
Summary: “What are you praying,” Heero demanded.  “Tell me, and it might get you another minute or two to sort out your affairs.”  Trowa wouldn’t tell him about the prayer; he wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. Instead, Trowa resorted to what he had always done best.  He lied...When Trowa Barton is captured by his target, he falls back on his best habits to keep himself alive.





	

**Author's Note:**

> A small project inspired by a photograph I saw. I'm working on getting back into the rhythm of writing, after graduating from graduate work and getting a break from academic work. Chapters much shorter than I (and you) are probably used to but updates should be more regular.

Trowa would give Heero Yuy some credit; he wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty.  He had ripped the knife out of Trowa’s hand when Trowa had gotten close enough—and fed enough information back to his employers—seconds before his guard detail even realized Trowa was a threat.  He had been a central piece in Trowa’s days-long interrogation.

And when Trowa remained silent, Heero had broken his legs himself.

Trowa shivered and shifted on the floor of his cell, pulled out of a fever dream by the distant but now familiar noise the outer lock in the king’s dungeon. Slowly, as he listened to the sharp, steady click of impeccably shined dress shoes on the concrete, Trowa eased himself up.  He was able to move himself, broken legs and manacled wrists and ankles be damned, towards the wall.  At least as far as the chain would allow.  Trowa had just managed to settle his shoulders back as comfortably as he could when the door to his cell unlocked and opened.

He was not surprised to see Heero there, in his usual dress pants and rolled-up shirt sleeves.  He was surprised to see the gun in his hand.  Heero had always taken a hands-on, almost intimate approach to Trowa’s interrogation and torture.  Hands and feet.  Knives. The occasional whip.  There was something cold and clinical about guns, something impersonal and finite. Trowa felt a dread cold spread out from his chest until he shivered hard all over. Heero smiled.

“You understand then,” he said simply, cultured voice amused but clipped. Heero walked closer, lifting the gun as he did until it was level with Trowa’s eyes.

“Now?” It was all Trowa managed to say when the full weight of the moment, the weight of the very few very precious moments left in his life, bore down on him from inside the barrel of the gun.  He had lost count of the days in the cell. Heero, or his principle gaoler, was clever; they had kept Trowa isolated.  Altered their visits and his meal times.  Kept him from making a schedule to try and wear him down.  It hadn’t, but it had kept him from knowing how long he was there.  Kept him from knowing how much time he had wasted until right now.

“Now,” Heero said.  He stopped just outside of kicking range, if Trowa had been able to kick. He smiled, mild and in another situation almost pleasant.  “I’m afraid you’ve ceased to be useful.”  

Trowa couldn’t begin to think about how keeping him, locked up in a cell with old and new blood and wounds and broken bones, was in any way useful to him.  Unless it had been entertaining.  And now was not.

Heero drew back the hammer and there was a small but decisive click as the chamber rotated.  Trowa, too tired and too sore and too shocked for anything else, closed his eyes.  He muttered under his breath.

Heero _laughed_.  “Somehow you didn’t strike me as particularly religious.”

Something about the comment made Trowa stiffen.  He had grown up religious; he remembered the sound of Catherine’s softly chanting voice and sweet cloying smoke of incense and perfume as they sat alone in the dull candle light.  He had long since given it up, and he was sure was given up by it, but Catherine was devout.  She sent him the pressed flowers in her letters, the ones she pulled off the mantle when she laid fresh blossoms down in the small shrine in her home. Catherine believed, and Heero sneered at it.  Trowa ground his teeth.

“Why?  Does it bother you,” he asked.  When Trowa opened his eye some, he saw Heero’s smile had gone cold and hard.

“What are you praying,” Heero demanded.  “Tell me, and it might get you another minute or two to sort out your affairs.”

Trowa wouldn’t tell him about the prayer; he wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. Instead, Trowa resorted to what he had always done best.

He lied.

“It is a right of my people.  Payment for safe passage into the gold beyond—”

“Even for the murderous, the disgraced, and the executed?”

Trowa sneered at him.  “It is my right and you cannot take it from me.”

“Oh can’t I,” Heero asked, gesturing slightly with the gun.  Trowa snorted.

“Shoot me, and you will never know.”  Trowa knew how much Heero Yuy hated the not knowing. Almost as predicted, Heero growled. He dropped down to his level, crouching over Trowa’s broken legs, and shaved him back into the concrete wall by the throat.  Trowa gagged and swallowed as Heero pressed the muzzle of the gun beneath his chin.  

“I think I will shoot you here.  If I do it just right, there’s a chance you’ll live, brain destroyed, and then you’ll never be able to finish that little prayer of yours before you bleed out.  Then we’ll both be disappointed.”

Trowa swallowed.  The metal barrel was cold against his adam’s apple.

“Now are you going to tell me, or are we going to see just how good I am?”

Trowa closed his eyes and took a shaking breath that was not entirely faked.  “The star.”

He didn’t need to open his eyes to see the look of confusion on Heero’s face. Trowa felt it in the slight way the muzzle moved on his skin as the gun rotated and the way Heero accidentally pressed on one of his legs as he shifted his weight. Trowa bit back a noise of pain.

“The star fell from the heavens,” Trowa murmured. “They gave him the power to move oceans and level mountains and they threw him from his bed in the heavens to the earth.  But he was only one, one of the chosen.  They plucked them from the stars and gave them strength of gods in return and threw them down to earth to fight as men.”

“This is not a prayer,” Heero said.  His voice was flat, except for at the end, where it turned up ever so slightly.  So hard not being a question, not being interest.  

“The five of them fell to earth, but she only saw the one.  From her carriage window, she saw him pierce the sky with light and disappear at the horizon. When she was returned home and her guards left for the night, she escaped her bedroom, safe warm prison she had always loved, and searched for him. She found him on the shore, dirty but whole, face buried in the sand.  She prayed he hadn’t died already as she rolled him over onto his back.”

Trowa paused, and then lapsed into honest silence. Long enough that Heero growled and nudged his jaw with the gun.  

“What is this,” he demanded.  “This isn’t a prayer.  Who is this girl and what are these ‘five stars’ you’re babbling about?”

Trowa opened his mouth soundlessly, head thunking back onto the concrete wall behind him as the pain built.  It _hurt_ , burning the corners of his vision and drowning out Heero’s words and his own, until there was nothing left but the pain, focused on the sharp pressure of Heero’s knee on his broken leg.  Trowa let out a weak keening sound of pain, most of it catching in his throat.  Just before he realized he would pass out, his eyes rolling back into his head, Heero seemed to notice.  Trowa thought he heard a sigh—but it could have been a rattling breath of his own—but he felt the blissful relief of the pressure on his leg as Heero shifted.  Trowa’s vision fully darkened and his body throbbed with the ache but at least the knee was gone.

Distantly, Trowa thought he felt a hand on him, touching his face and neck, and then guiding his body down to lay on the floor. That couldn’t be, though, and Trowa was sure he had just slid to the side.  Slowly.  Somehow.

He was sure about the water though because he could taste it against his dry lips.  And unlike that first drink of water, that had slid into his mouth by accident after being dumped on his head to wake him up the first night, this wasn’t stale or warm.  It was cold and clean and ran into his mouth in a steady, nourishing trickle.  It was, perhaps, the best possible thing to chase Trowa into unconsciousness.

* * *

When Heero sent the physician on the third day to set his legs, Trowa’s screams echoed throughout the dungeon.


End file.
